A wide variety of means exist for communication between users. For example, a user may conduct phone calls via a home phone, work phone, and mobile phone. In addition, users may also communicate using devices such as PCs, PDAs, pagers, etc., using various means of communicating such as voice, email, short text messaging, and instant messaging.
Mobile devices offer a significant convenience to users who travel. However, the user may return home or to work only to find several voicemails and missed calls. Call forwarding features alleviate the problem of missed calls and voicemails, but a user may forget to turn the feature on before leaving. In addition, a user may not always want calls to be forwarded automatically or may want only to review a call log and other call data remotely, without having calls forwarded.
Currently, no services exist for easily and conveniently accessing or synchronizing with call data, including call logs, call forward lists, etc., while carrying on a voice conversation. Blackberry devices offer services that synchronize a remote Blackberry device with business data (e.g., contacts, email) stored on a server. However, no similar services exist for other mobile devices, such as Palm Treo devices, even though such devices are equipped to handle voice communications and data communications using various formats and protocols.
Virtually every mobile device is equipped to send and receive messages formatted according to Short Message Service (SMS) protocols. SMS messages are short messages that may be transmitted and received without interrupting a voice call. However, SMS messages are not secure; they are easily intercepted or observed by anyone having the proper scanning equipment, and can be “spoofed”—made to look as though the message came from another (trusted) party. Moreover, SMS messages are designed to carry payloads of only 160 seven-bit characters. Therefore, SMS messages are popular mainly for transmitting brief non-secure human-readable text messages, but are otherwise underutilized.